Inside, Outside, page 24
“And where and what is Sde Shalom?”
“A kibbutz down south.” Taking no notice of my amazement, she added, “Let me have my return air ticket now, okay?”
“Aren’t you flying back with me?”
“I’ll probably leave before you do. I’m not staying here any longer than I have to.”
“How will you get to this Sde Shalom?”
“Don’t worry.”
“You don’t know a word of Hebrew.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Have some dinner first, at least.”
“Okay.”
We drank a lot of Israeli red wine with the six-course kosher dinner, and she loosened up. She liked the noble proportions of the King David dining room, and the Levantine decor dating back to the British mandate. What a pity it was, she said, that imperialism was finished, however immoral it had been. She then disclosed the purpose of her trip; nothing less than to get a leg up on her M.A. in political science at Johns Hopkins. She’s enrolled for the fall, and she already has a theme and a title for her master’s thesis: “The Israeli Peace Movement: Progressive Countercurrents in a Proto-Fascist State.”
What the enterprising young baggage had done, bypassing Abe Herz, was to write directly to his uncle at Sde Shalom, General Moshe Lev. Lev at once answered warmly that she’d be welcome there any time. She has brought along in her duffel bag books and articles about the peace movement, and already has a head full of undigested ideas on the subject. The trip to Sde Shalom is field research. Now what the little dear doesn’t know—has no way in the world of knowing—is why General Moshe Lev fired back such a friendly letter. Only two other people in the world would know beside Lev: my sister Lee and I. In the interest of truth and art, I’ll now briefly rattle a family skeleton.
***
There’s a big branch of the Herz family here; Herz is Yiddish for heart, and the Hebrew word is Lev, hence the name change long ago in the Palestine branch. Mark Herz’s cousin, Moshe Lev, practically started the Israeli air force, and Moshe Lev is the man my sister Lee fell in love with when she visited Palestine back in the dim thirties. Mark and I were then college friends, and Mark mentioned that he had relatives in Jerusalem. He gave me the address. Moshe Lev was a much-married fellow with three kids, but these Israelis are sometimes free-wheeling types, the ones who aren’t religious. Lee came home all shaken up and starry-eyed, whispering to me of a divorce cooking over there. In the end nothing happened. Lee settled down happily with her doctor in Port Chester, and just smoked twice as much ever after. Lee seldom speaks of Israel, but when she does there’s a tremolo in her throat, to this day.
Just incidentally, Moshe Lev and Mark Herz are named after the same grandfather, most of whose descendants remained in Russia and were murdered by the Germans. In America Moshe, of course, became Mark. Israelis don’t have outside names. If anything, they tend to switch to even more inside names, as in changing Herz to Lev. When I telephoned Abe at his office, I heard the secretary call him Rommy, short for Avrohom, Hebrew Abraham. How it happens that Abe wasn’t named Alan or Aubrey I don’t know. I’ll have to ask his father sometime.
Mark Herz happens to be here, giving the Sir Isaac Something lectures at the Technion Institute in Haifa, no doubt for an exceedingly fat fee. Nothing else could get him to Israel. I read about the lectures in the Jerusalem Post, and when I talked to Abe I asked him whether he’d seen Mark. His gruff reply was that he hadn’t seen or spoken to his father in five years, and intended to leave it that way. And so much for skeleton-rattling. General Moshe Lev was responding to the niece of the enchanting Leonore Goodkind, you see, when he wrote that cordial invitation to Sandra.
Typically, once Sandra took off to Sde Shalom I heard nothing from her for over a week. Had she arrived there at all? Had she left? I didn’t know. Finding out the telephone number of the kibbutz took some doing. Getting through was next to impossible. The line was busy, hours on end. When I finally did reach her today, Sandra told me they have exactly one phone for her ninety-seven members; kibbutz policy, she thinks, to keep to a minimum contact with the decadent bourgeois society beyond the orange groves. She said she was ready to go back if I was. I told her that Mom was holding her own, and that I’d finally seen Golda Meir, so we could leave anytime. “Has it been interesting there?” I asked.
“Well, I’ve learned a lot. Say, why not come down here and get me? Meet a different kind of Israeli.”
So I telephoned Abe Herz for directions to Sde Shalom, intending to drive there in my rented car. It didn’t occur to me that he wouldn’t know Sandra was in Israel. He said the roads south of Beersheba were confusing and he hadn’t seen his Uncle Moshe for a long time, so he would take me there himself. I’m to meet him at his law office in Tel Aviv, and it’ll be a four-hour run south through the Negev. The Sde Shalom kibbutzniks farm the southwest corner of pre-1967 Israel, formed by the Gaza Strip and the Sinai border, thus asking for terrorist trouble from two directions. That’s where these peace lovers have chosen to settle.
***
As for Golda Meir, I’d call her a political edition of Mama; not as whimsical or impossible as the big yoxenta, to be sure, but basically another nice Jewish lady with a brick, whom fate has made a world figure. She was in Europe when I got here, and when she returned she was tied up for days. I had to wait more than a week to see her and give her a verbal message from the President, about which I will say nothing. She did not comment on the President’s message; just sat there sober and silent for a few moments, then told me to come and see her again before I left Israel.
It’s strange that a nobody like me can go between two such world-famous politicians. So help me, I think the President’s confidence in me started with the fact that I study the Talmud. Somehow that got to him. It couldn’t matter less to Golda Meir. She thinks I’m some kind of religious nut. Once she invited me to her home for dinner, long before she became Prime Minister. I wouldn’t eat her meat—she’s a bone-deep old irreligious socialist—and she was amazed and slightly put out, then laughed it off and fixed me some hard-boiled eggs. Golda likes fussing in the kitchen. She’s typecast for American television as the Israeli Prime Minister, old Mother Sarah herself. But she is, in fact, a cool-handed politician who, in the old saying, chews nails and spits tacks. I wouldn’t want to cross her.
How am I acquainted with Golda Meir? Well, the legal counsel for the United Jewish Appeal gets to meet the people over here who count. The tax problems are tricky, and clear sensible advice is much wanted. I inherited a mess, and Mrs. Meir admired the way I straightened matters out. Later, when she toured the United States for the UJA and Israel Bonds, she asked that I escort her. You come to know somebody pretty well, doing a road show like that together. I’ve been out of UJA work for a while, and this is the first time I’ve seen Golda since she became Prime Minister, but everything was the same between us. Israeli leaders don’t stand on ceremony. They can’t. The Israelis would just laugh them down and vote them out.
***
Golda got right to business, cross-examining me about Watergate, chain-smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes. It worries her. What’s behind all the uproar? What can it matter, that silly break-in to the Democratic national headquarters? Is that a reason to bring down a President? There must be something else going on. I tried to explain about the cover-up, and the new sensation of the tapes. She knows the details, but though she was born in Kiev and grew up in Milwaukee, she’s Israeli through and through. The actual outrage of it all doesn’t register.
She thinks the President’s the best we’ve had since Truman; and not just because he’s been decent to Israel. They were edgy over here when he took office, since the American Jews were so dead set against him. But in foreign affairs, says Golda, he’s proved himself a remarkable man. She thinks that he got us out of the Vietnam mess—left by three other Presidents, she points out—the best way any man could have done; that he’s been handling the Germans and the Soviet Union very craftily; and that the turn to China was a masterstroke. I suggested that our celebrated National Security Adviser had performed those feats, pretty much. She cut me off. “He works for a boss,” she observed very drily. And she said that when I see her again before I leave, she’ll give me her reply to the President.
But will he still be in office by the time I get back to the States? A serious question. Our President is a very lungfish for surviving, but now he is surely done for. Ye gods, that electrifying moment on television when the sacred little bureaucrat spilled the beans about the tapes! Those Senate hearings had been droning downhill. I thought the President might be escaping his harriers, after all, because they were getting so dull and boring. But wow, you could see all those sleepy senators stiffen and their eyes bulge, and you almost expected their hair, those who had any, to shoot out in all directions. “That’s it,” I said to myself. I’ve been planning my return to private life ever since. Not that I’m going to resign at this point. Not me. The rats are jumping ship in droves, it’s getting to be a rodent stampede, and maybe that’s why I’ve been digging in. He deserves to fall, and will fall, but until that happens I’ll be there with the ethical angle, and any other way I can help him, as he does the stations of the political cross on his knees.
Surely this is the loneliest President that ever was, and the strangest. Foreign leaders admire him, yet I don’t believe that at home even Andrew Johnson was more reviled, or Harding more obtusely and naively corrupt. What stuns me is his blind stupidity in this Watergate matter. You almost start believing the Freudian stuff about a death wish. I contributed some ethical touches to his second big Watergate speech on television, delivered with such fanfare just before I departed. His entourage, what’s left of it, said it was a big success, turned the tide, and all that. I saw him right after the broadcast. He thanked me and shook my hand and looked me in the eye, even as the White House crowd was congratulating him on all sides; and I could see that he knew to a hair the difference that the speech had made—i.e., zilch. He is many men, the President, and none of those men is a fool, except for the one knucklehead who has stumbled into the Watergate quicksand, and is dragging down all the others.
“Enjoy Israel,” he said. “I hope you find your mother better.”
***
At odd moments here I’ve been reading the galleys of Peter Quat’s new opus. Hair-raising! I’m halfway through them, and can hardly believe my eyes. I had them on the plane, and didn’t get far when Sandra tried to collar them. I fended her off. My pretty little Sandra considers herself liberated and no doubt she is—too much so—but I’m damned if I’d let her read those galleys. Not while I sat beside her. I couldn’t look her in the eye!
Yet I’ll never regret fighting the obscenity cases. Airport bookstores may be lined with steamy paperbacks and crotch magazines as a result, and raunchy Jewish scriveners, male and female, like old Peter—Mark Herz calls them “School of Quat” novelists—may have been turned loose to write their comic scurrilities about the chosen people, but anyone can read Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence who wants to; and when the new Twains and Dreisers and Dostoevskys come along, they won’t have to pussyfoot about the facts of life. That was worth it. So I keep telling myself as I wander through airport bookstores, feeling vaguely guilty, or as I read the galleys of Peter’s latest opus.
Mark is peculiarly censorious about Peter, and down on me for defending Deflowering Sarah in the Cincinnati bookstore case. Mark was in Israel when Peter made a triumphal tour lecturing about his sizzling Pulitzer Prize novel, Onan’s Way. He still fumes about that. Mark had come here to plead with his son not to sign up for a fighter pilot course he eventually washed out of. That was five years ago, and they had some kind of explosive bust-up on that occasion.
***
Well, bedtime. It’ll be a long day tomorrow, getting to that kibbutz.
I’ve been asking around about Sde Shalom. The name means Fields of Peace. The members disapprove of the Israeli government as occupiers and oppressors, and advocate giving back all the territories and working out some nice friendly deal with the Arabs. The founders are anarchic malcontents from old collectives, who feel that prosperity is shooting the socialist dream all to hell and choking the kibbutz movement in fat. It’s a young struggling collective, only about six years old. The members get out and demonstrate against building settlements or strong points in Sinai. When the government recently moved some Bedouins out of a desert area to build a fighter base, the Fields of Peace members went out en masse and lay down in front of the bulldozers. They also took the government to court on behalf of the Bedouins. You begin to understand why Sandra has landed there.
Kibbutzim can be far left, middle left, left religious, moderate religious, and so on. There are a few hundred kibbutzim all over Israel, but none is quite as far-out as Sde Shalom. It’s a throwback to early Zionism, a split-off from the extreme socialist “Young Guardians.” The members are purists, striving to return to the simple pioneer life and to keep the red flame burning, so to speak; hence their anti-imperialist rhetoric, their severe communal rules, and their demonstrations for peace. The other Israelis tend to admire and respect Sde Shalom for its old-fashioned austere idealism, while regarding the members as lovable cuckoos.
Kibbutzniks are Israel’s low-profile elite, no doubt of that, and have been since the pioneer socialist days. I’ve heard that sixty or seventy percent of the army officers, for instance, are kibbutzniks. What they all do is cultivate the land. The stretches of fruitful green plains that mark off Israel from the gray sands of the Sinai and Jordan, seen from the air, are likely to be collective farms. Some collectives have failed, others barely hang on. Still others have become so wealthy, down the years, that as socialist believers they’re nonplussed and embarrassed by their own riches.
“Kibbutz” and “collective” mean the same, but to me “kibbutz” happens to be about the ugliest word there is—in English, not in Hebrew. In Hebrew it sounds fine. Key-boots. But you link that harsh k to that low-comedy doubled b and that eructating utz, and you have got a word that Peter Quat himself might have invented, to suggest something Jewish and disagreeable, like his smelly melamed Shraga Glutz. The word embodies everything I resisted in Zionism when I was growing up.
Before I turn in, let me explain that resistance. I’m not sleepy; high energy charge of Jerusalem air.
34
Bernice Lavine
It was on a Friday night that Pop and I walked to the first Zionist meeting I ever attended. I was fourteen. Zaideh was already living with us. Picture my reaction, then, at coming into a hall hazy with tobacco smoke, where the men sat chewing enormous black cigars and the few women puffed at cigarettes; and where, after the lecture, platters of sandwiches were brought out, which Pop muttered to me not to eat. The caution was superfluous. I had long since learned to recognize, in the Townsend Harris lunchroom, the pallid pink square look of sandwich ham. There was no mistaking what these Zionists were regaling themselves with on Sabbath eve: the swine for sure, and very likely the abomination and the mouse.
Well, I heard the word kibbutz for the first time that evening, in the lecture. The word stays in my mind forever associated with tobacco smoke and ham on Friday night. I’m not being censorious, I’m just describing how a fourteen-year-old boy, with a Hassidic rabbi for a grandfather, reacted to his first glimpse of that Bronx Zionist chapter. On our way home I asked my father about such goings-on. “It’s not always like that,” he said wearily. “That’s Spiegel’s doing. Spiegel would eat pigskin gloves on Yom Kippur, to make his point.” Spiegel evidently was the chapter’s arch-rebel, and in charge of that night’s refreshments; which, I must say, rapidly vanished from the platters.
Then I wanted Pop to explain exactly what a kibbutz was. It’s odd how little things stick in your mind. We were walking past Loew’s Boulevard, where a Douglas Fairbanks picture was playing. Outside stood a big cardboard cutout of Fairbanks, dashing, mustached, grinning, the ultimate American hero. Papa was trying to explain the farm-collective idea; and he stamped on my young mind once for all the sense that a “kibbutz,” whatever it might be, stood at the opposite pole from America and from Douglas Fairbanks, smiling at me on that cardboard cutout.
That summer I was sent to a Zionist camp. Camp Carmel, it was called, until early in August it suddenly became Camp Herzl, causing no end of confusion in things like camp banners, stationery, and marching songs. I believe this happened because of a fast bankruptcy proceeding. In money matters the owner, an impractical dreamer named Mr. Kapilsky, was the very opposite of Mr. Dresser. He bought and had hauled up to the Poconos, for instance, an enormous old motor launch, just to give the campers rides on the Jake. This vessel, which he renamed the Theodor Herzl, sank on its maiden voyage. Forty kids had to swim ashore in their best camp clothes, and at least half of those campers were yanked home. Possibly that was why Mr. Kapilsky went bust and had to change the camp’s name. It would be like him to rename it Camp Herzl, with that derelict Theodor Herzl still sunk in plain sight in the lake, its rusty deckhouse sticking out above some nine feet of water.
Mr. Kapilsky’s whole caper was Zionism, and the camp was an offshoot of “Young Herzlians,” an institute he ran in Brooklyn. I have no reason to believe Mr. Kapilsky’s enthusiasm for Palestine was not genuine, except that he never went there in his whole life. I know that for a fact. When I was doing the UJA thing I encountered him at a meeting in Brooklyn, very shrunken and white-haired, still a hot Zionist, and looking forward—so he told me—to retiring to Israel. It was a pity, he said, that he had been too busy promoting the cause ever to get over to the promised land. “But as you know,” he commented, “Theodor Herzl only spent a few days in Palestine, all in all.”
